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Joanne Nucho and Jeff Ono

When Joanne Nucho was a child, her metzmama — that’s Armenian for “grandmother” — Isabel Kouyoumjian seemed like a superhero. She was tough, fearless, and even, Joanne says, a little pushy. But it wasn’t until later on that Joanne learned how she had come to be that way.

Isabel’s parents fled the Ottoman Empire (the region known today as Turkey) during the Armenian Genocide. It’s estimated that 1.5 million Armenians were killed by the empire’s ruling party during this ethnic extermination campaign.

Isabel was born in a refugee camp in Lebanon, and would later start her family in Beirut. During the Lebanese Civil War, Isabel and her two daughters came to the United States and settled near Los Angeles, California — the region with the world’s highest concentration of Armenians outside of their home country. That’s where she helped raise Joanne, and two other granddaughters, until her death at the age of 85 on March 3, 2016.

At StoryCorps, Joanne tells her husband, Jeff Ono, about her metzmama’s big personality and the outsized influence she had on her life.

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Joanne Nucho (JN) and Jeff Ono (JO)

JN: My grandmother was a large woman but on the shorter side; she just was kind of round. [Laughs] She did not have much formal education but spoke and read five languages. She was very sweet and loving to me, but she had this really tough streak.

JO: What’s one of the stories that conveyed her toughness to you?

JN: One incident I remember, we were kids and there was a lizard in the backyard. My younger sister saw it and screamed, so my grandmother picked it up and broke it in half with her bare hands. And it was a mixture of being horrified but also really impressed. I just thought that she was like a superhero.

She didn’t smile much. She kind of had a permanent scowl. And I didn’t know where it came from. But I heard stories about how she raised two kids by herself. And, you know, so much of her ways of seeing the world were really bound up with knowing the ground could fall out from beneath you at any moment, and that she would weather whatever storm.

JO: You had a very close relationship with her that wasn’t just grandmother and granddaughter.

JN: Yeah. She was my best friend.

You know, that last week when she was dying, I just kept telling her, ‘It’s okay to go. You’ve done your work. You don’t have to fight this if you don’t want to.’

And I miss the little things, like speaking Armenian with somebody — not something I do very often anymore. I miss feeling like there’s this one person who really believes in me. It’s something I’m trying to do for myself, but nobody else could convince me the way that she could. And there isn’t really a replacement for that.